A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

by Hank Davis

  Christmas has been imported as well, yet because the aresian year was nearly twice as long as Earth’s, it comes around half as often. The first colonists tried having their Christmas promptly on December 25th, but it felt odd to be celebrating Christmas twice a year, sometimes in the middle of the Martian summer. When the colonies formally adopted the Zubrin calendar in m.y. 38, it was decided that the aresian Christmas would fall only once two Earth years; this meant that we had to devise our own way of observing the holiday. So instead of designating one single sol in Taurus as being Christmas Day, aresians picked the second week of the month as Christmas Week, beginning on Ta.6 and continuing through Ta.13; it was roughly adapted from the Dutch tradition of observing December 6 as the Feast of St. Nicholas. During that week, everyone would take a break from all but the most essential labor, and this would give families and clans a chance to get together and exchange gifts. Devout Christians who wished to continue unofficially observing December 25 as Jesus’ birthday were welcome to do so—New Chattanooga and Wellstown took two sols off each aresian year for a terran-style Christmas—but it wasn’t marked on the Zubrin calendar.

  Most of the original Seven Colonies, with the exception of West Bank, accepted Christmas Week as a respite from the hard work of settling the Martian frontier. As more immigrants from Earth and the Moon began establishing new colonies along the eastern equator, they adopted Christmas Week as well. Yet, as time went on, the aresian Christmas began to lose much of its original meaning.

  Indeed, as some noted, the week never had that much meaning to begin with. Since it wasn’t held to celebrate of the birth of Christ, it had little religious significance. Families and clans tended to live in the same colonies, often sharing the same quarters, so there wasn’t much point in setting aside an entire week for them to get together. These colonists lived on the verge of poverty; Pax trade tariffs and the enormous cost of importing items from Earth made Christmas presents beyond the reach of most people, and giving someone a new helmet liner is hardly the stuff of romance. So what usually happened during Christmas Week was that people congregated in taprooms to get ripped on homebrew and weed; when the taprooms closed, louts roamed the corridors looking for trouble. By mid-century, Christmas Week had degenerated into debauchery, random violence, and the occasional fatal accident. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

  Worse yet was the fact that the first generation of aresians to be born on Mars was growing up with only second-hand knowledge of what Christmas was supposed to be like. They’d read old microfiche stories about Rudolph and Santa Claus, the Grinch and Scrooge, or watch disks of ancient films like It’s A Wonderful Life and Frosty the Snowman, and then go to their parents asking why Santa didn’t drop down their chimney to leave wrapped and ribboned gifts beneath a tree strung with lights and tiny ornaments. Perhaps you can successfully explain to a four-year-old why there aren’t any reindeer and Douglas firs on Mars, or even point out that your two-room apartment doesn’t have a hearth, let alone a chimney . . . but try telling a small child that there’s no such person as Santa.

  Mars was in desperate need of a St. Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In m.y. 52, he arrived in the form of Dr. Johann Spanjaard.

  Despite the fact that I’m one of the few people on Mars who knew him well, there’s very little I can tell you about Doc Spanjaard. That’s not much a surprise, though; folks came here for many different reasons, and not always the best ones. Frontiers tend to attract people who didn’t quite fit in the places they came from, and on Mars it’s impolite to ask someone about their past if they don’t voluntarily offer that information themselves. Some aresians will blabber all day about their home towns or their old job, but others I’ve known for twenty years and still don’t know where they were born, or even their real names.

  Johann Spanjaard fell somewhere between these extremes. He was born in Holland, but I don’t know when: around a.d. 2030 is my best guess, since he appeared to be in his early forties when he arrived at Arsia Station. He was trained as a paramedic, and briefly worked on Clarke County; and later at Descartes Station. He was a Moon War vet; he told me that he witnessed the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis, but if he had any combat medals he never showed them to me. He returned to Earth, stayed there a little while, left again to take a short job as a beltship doctor, then finally immigrated to Mars. There were at least two women in his past—Anja, his first wife, and Sarah, his second—but he seldom spoke of them, although he sent them occasional letters.

  No children. In hindsight, that may be the most significant fact of all: even after marrying and leaving two wives, Doc didn’t have any kids. Save that thought.

  Doc Spanjaard immigrated to Mars in m.y. 52, five aresian years before the colonies broke away from Pax. By then Arsia Station had become the largest colony; nearly a hundred thousand people lived in reasonable comfort within the buckydomes and underground malls that had grown up around the base camp of the original American expedition, just south of the Noctis Labyrinthis where, on a nice clear day, you could just make out the massive volcanic cone of Arsia Mons looming over the western horizon. The colony had finally expanded its overcrowded infirmary into a full-fledged hospital, and Doc was one of the people hired to staff its new emergency ward.

  I came to know Doc because of my job as an airship pilot. One of Arsia General’s missions was providing medical airlifts to our six neighbor colonies in the western hemisphere; although they had infirmaries of their own, none possessed Arsia General’s staff or equipment. The hospital had contracted my employer, AeroMars, to fly doctors out to these remote settlements and, on occasion, bring back patients for treatment. Within two sols of Doc’s arrival at Arsia General, I flew him over the Valles Marineris to Wellstown so he could treat a burn victim from an explosion at the fuel depot. We ended up hauling the poor guy back to Arsia Station that same day; the sortie lasted twenty-seven hours, coming and going, and when it was over we were too wired to go to bed, so we wandered over to the Mars Hotel and had a few beers.

  That trip established a regular pattern for us: fly out, do what had to be done, fly back, hand the case over to the ER staff, then head to the nearest taproom to decompress. However, I seldom saw Doc Spanjaard get loaded; three beers was his limit, and he never touched hard liquor. Which was fine with me; I’m a featherweight drinker myself, and two beers was the most I’d allow myself because I never knew when I’d get beeped to drag Miss Thuvia back into the sky again. But the three of us logged a lot of klicks together; once I had the princess tied down in her hangar and Doc had washed someone else’s blood off his hands, we’d park our rumps in a quiet bar and tap mugs for a job well done.

  We were a mutt-‘n-jeff team if there ever was one. Doc was tall and preposterously skinny, with solemn blue eyes and fair skin that helmet burn had freckled around his trim white beard; imagine an underfed St. Nicholas and you’ve got it down. I was the short, dumpy black sidekick from Tycho City who had a thing for Burroughs classics and loved old Eddie Murphy movies even though I had never spent more than two weeks on Earth (what can I say? he made me laugh). But Doc had a wry sense of humor that most people didn’t see, and I was the only airlift pilot who wouldn’t panic when he had to perform a emergency tracheotomy at twelve hundred meters with a utility knife and a pen.

  We saw a lot of action over the course of the next nine months; by my count, we saved at least thirty lives and lost only four. Not bad for two guys whose biggest complaint was losing a lot of sleep. The Martian Chronicle caught wind of our act and wanted to do a story on us. We talked it over during a ride back from Sagan, then radioed back to Arsia General and arranged for the reporter to meet us at the Mars Hotel after we got home. The reporter was there, along with his photographer and one of Doc’s former patients, a sweet young thing from West Bank whose heart was still beating again due to Doc’s ministrations and my flying skills, but gee gosh, we forgot where we were supposed to meet them and went to Lucky Pierre’s instead. Two more missed inter
views, followed by profuse apologies and sworn promises that we’d at the right place next time, went by before the Chronicle finally got the message. On Mars, the phrase “mind your own business” is taken seriously, even by the press.

  But it wasn’t always funny stuff. Our job took us places you’d never want to see, the settlements established along the equatorial zone surrounding the Valles Marineris. Over forty Earth years had elapsed since First Landing, and humankind had made substantial footholds on this big red planet, yet beyond the safe, warm confines of Arsia Station life could be pretty grim. New Chattanooga was infested with sandbugs, the seemingly indestructible mites which lived in the permafrost and homed in on any aquifer large enough for them to lay eggs; the colony’s water tanks were literally swimming with them, and despite the best filtration efforts they were in every cup of coffee you drank and every sponge-bath you took. DaVinci was populated by neocommunists who, despising bourgeois culture and counterrevolutionary influences, wanted little to do with the rest of the colonies, and therefore turned down most aid offered by Arsia Station; their subsurface warrens were cold and dimly-lit, their denizens hard-eyed and ready to quote Mao Tse Tung as soon as you entered the airlock. Viking, the northernmost settlement, was located on the Chryse Planitia near the Viking I landing site: two hundred people huddled together in buckydomes while eking out the most precarious of existences, and every time we visited them, the population had grown a little smaller. And people spoke only in hushed tones about Ascension, the settlement near Sagan just south of the Valles Marineris that had been founded by religious zealots; living in self-enforced isolation, running short of food and water, finally cut off from the neighboring colonies by the planetwide dust storm of m.y. 47, its inhabitants began murdering one another, then cannibalizing the corpses.

  Doc and I saw a side of the Martian frontier that most people on Earth didn’t even know existed: hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or malfunctioning equipment, psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our sorrows in homemade brew. There’s many wonderful things about Mars, but it’s not Earth or even the Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it doesn’t kill outright, it conspires to drive insane.

  Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what we missed about Christmas.

  It was the third week of Aries, m.y. 53. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the taprooms were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just returned from delivering medical supplies to the poor schmucks at Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some discarded fiberoptics over the bar.

  “I miss mistletoe,” I murmured. I was working on my second beer by then, so I wasn’t conscious of my alliteration. “Mistletoe and Christmas trees.”

  “You don’t know mistletoe and Christmas trees,” Doc said.

  “Sure do. Had them in my family’s apartment. My mother and father, they used to kiss beneath the . . .”

  “You grew up on the Moon. You had vinyl mistletoe and plastic Christmas trees. Bet you’ve never smelled the real thing.”

  “No, but it was close enough.”

  “Not in the slightest. You’d know the difference.” Doc sipped his beer. “But I get the point. Out in the belt, we’d get together in the wardroom on Christmas Eve and sing carols. You know caroling . . . ?”

  “Sure. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘The First Day of Christmas,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ . . .”

  “‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,’ that’s my favorite. And then we’d exchange gifts. Sarah gave me a ring with a little piece of gold from an asteroid ore our ship had refined.” He smiled at the memory. “Marriage didn’t last, but I held onto the ring.”

  “My favorite was a little rocket from my Dad. I was eight . . . nine, I guess. He made it for me in his lab. About two meters long, with a hollow nose cone. We put a little note with our squid number in the cone, then went EVA and hiked up to the crater rim, set the trajectory, fueled it up and fired it at Earth.” Once again, I remembered that little rocket’s silent launch, and how it lanced straight up into the black sky over Tycho. “Dad told me that it would eventually get there and land somewhere, and maybe someone would find it and send back a letter.”

  “Anyone ever fax you?”

  “Naw. It probably never got to Earth . . . or if it did, it probably burned up on entry.” I shrugged. “But I like to think that it made the trip, and just landed some place where no one ever found it.”

  “But it meant something, didn’t it? Like Sarah’s ring. No Christmas gift is ever insignificant. There’s always a little of your soul in whatever you give someone.” Doc scowled at the lights being strung above the bar. “Here, it’s just an excuse for people to get drunk and stupid, and the next day everyone has to apologize to each other. Sorry for banging on your door. Sorry for keeping you awake last night. Sorry for making a pass at your wife . . .”

  “What do you expect? Rudolph the green-nosed reindeer?”

  “Red. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Don’t they teach you selenians anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. Red-nosed reindeer.” I polished off my second and last, shoved the mug across the bar. “Yeah, I know, but all that Santa stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense out here, y’know?”

  “It doesn’t? Why shouldn’t it?”

  I could tell that he was spoiling for a fight. “Aw, c’mon, Doc . . . does this look like Earth to you? Cheststuff smoking on an open fire, jackass stepping on your toes . . .”

  “You can’t even get the lyrics right! ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes . . .’”

  “What’s a chestnut?”

  “Never mind.” He turned away from me. “Jeff, I’ll have another one. Put it on his tab.”

  I didn’t object. Doc was in a self-righteous mood; when he was this way, silence was the only way you could deal with him. I helped myself to some fried algae from the bowl the bartender had placed between us while I waited for him to calm down.

  “I guess what I miss the most,” he finally said, “is the look . . . no, not just the look, the glow . . . children have on Christmas morning. Until I came here, I’d never seen a kid who didn’t think it was the best day of the year. Even out in the Belt, it was something they could look forward to. But here . . .”

  “I know what you mean.” My gaze wandered to the line of ceramic liquor bottles lined up on the shelf. “The best some of them can hope for is that their folks won’t be too hung over to make breakfast for them. I mean, some people try to do better, but . . . I dunno, something’s missing.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s missing.” Doc tapped his finger against the bar top. “It isn’t just trees or presents. Magic, that’s missing. There’s no Sinterklass”

  “Yeah. No Santa Claus.”

  “Did I say Santa Claus? I didn’t say Santa Claus. I said Sinterklass.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  For a moment, I thought he was going to brain me with his beer mug. “Hell, yes, there’s a difference! Sinterklass arrives in Holland on a ship from Spain. He’s a tall, slender gent with a long white beard who wears a red robe and bishop’s minter. He rides into town on a white horse with his assistant Zwarte Piet, where he gives presents to all the good children on his list. Then he . . . what’s so damn funny?”

  “That’s Santa Claus, you quack! Only the details are different! Reindeer, elves, a sleigh from the North Pole . . . it’s still the same mook, right down to the extortion racket.”

  “True, but Sinterklass came first . . . or St. Nicholas, if we want to call him by his proper name.” He swigged his beer. “He was brought to America by the Dutch, but just like everything else brought over from Europe, he was changed until virtually no one remembered his origins.”

  “Tell me about it. Same thing happened to my African ancestors . . . although not by choice
.”

  “Then you’d appreciate the similarity between Santa’s elves and Zwarte Piet. It means Black Peter . . . he’s a Moor.”

  I shrugged. “Sounds like a demotion. My great-grandfather used to play Santa every Christmas at a shopping mall. There weren’t many black Santas back then, I’m told.”

  “Your grandfather played Santa Claus?” He raised an eyebrow. “Now there’s a coincidence. My father played Sinterklass in our village, as did my grandfather.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Goes with the genes.” He stroked his trim white beard. “Men in my family have the right whiskers for the job. All we have to do is let our beard grow out and . . .”

  He stopped just there. To this day, I’ll never forget his slack-jawed expression as he stared at me in wonderment. He had just spoken of the glow that children have on Christmas morning; in that instant, I saw something like that appear in his own face. Wonder and joy, wonder and joy; tidings of wonder and joy . . . I don’t believe in telepathy any more than I do in Santa Claus, yet I suddenly knew exactly what he was thinking.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, turning to hop off the stool and book out of there. “Don’t even think for a minute . . .”

  “Oh, shut up and sit down.” Doc grabbed my wrist before I could make it to the door. “Let’s see if we can work this out.”